This post was promoted from YouMoz. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Hi SEOmoz folks,

Some weeks ago my coworker Leandro Riolino published in our blog an experiment he was working with. The idea of the experiment was to try link to a page A from a page B with 3 different anchor texts providing value of all those anchor texts.

The idea is simple: we chose 3 random keywords, created an internal page, created 3 links to different URLs that have a canonical tag to the main page. You can see this idea illustrated bellow:

So, after choosing the 3 keywords we submitted each one to check if Google has any occurrences of them:

Then we bought a new domain, that has no backlinks and as you can see bellow, Google shows us that this website isn't in the index:

Creating the Index Page

To start the experiment my coworker downloaded a random template from the Internet with some random content inside, changing only the page title, meta description and H1 tag focusing all them into the main website keyword “jogos online de corrida” (online race games in English). The major change he made into the template was to add a conditional check with PHP to insert the canonical tag if the URL requested had any parameter:

For those who know something about PHP language, this code checks if the variable $_GET exists. If this check returns true the code insert the canonical tag line into the HTML.

It’s important to say that we do not mention any of those 3 keywords in the Index Page. So, this page can’t rank for having a keyword mention… instead Google needs to check it’s backlinks.

Internal Page

The next step was to create the internal page. We created it with 3 links in 3 different page positions: one in the header, another one in the content area and the last one in the footer area with the following anchor text: “nanuoretfcvds ksabara1″, “esjstisfdfkf aasjdkwer” e “gisrterssia fdswreasfs”. Each link had different targets:

http://www.jogosonlinedecorrida.com.br/?keyword=key1

http://www.jogosonlinedecorrida.com.br/?keyword=key2

http://www.jogosonlinedecorrida.com.br/?keyword=key3

It’s important to say that we used the meta tag <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” /> into this internal page, so this page would not rank for those 3 keywords.

Indexing the Content

In order to have the pages indexed by Google my coworker created a Sitemap.XML with the 2 pages (home and internal) and submitted it to Google Webmaster Tools. It is important to say that we did not share this page in any webpage and did not submit in any bookmarking service.

After 2 weeks, our website was showing the 2 pages when we used the operator “site:”. After one more week Google was showing the 2 pages and the link to their cache.

After this “waiting time” we searched in Google on the 3 keywords that we created and noticed that the main page was appearing for ALL of them as you can see bellow:

So, with this small experiment we noticed that Google was giving to a page 3 anchor text values if we use the canonical tag as a funnel.

Conclusions and Applications

With this small experiment we have a hint on how Google treats the anchor text of a page that uses the rel=canonical tag and now we can try to create some new experiments (eg.: use a parameter in the logo link to your main page, and then receive the anchor text of the second link – because we know that only the first anchor text counts).

We know that this is a single experiment and we need to see if this works in a real website, because we know that Google understands the page segments and this maybe does not work as we presented in this article. We still need to try and check this.

I can’t end this article until saying congratulations to my coworker Leandro that provided me a huge amount of knowledge with this experiment – thank you.

An interesting idea and well thought out approach to testing your hypothesis. However, I'm really not sure that this tactic is entirely beneficial. I am really interested to hear your thoughts on a couple questions I have.

Here are my questions:

A) Yes, you now have three different anchor text links to the home page, but aren't each of those links now diluted because the internal page has three links to the home instead of one?

B) Might the use of canonical tags further eat a tiny bit of link juice? In other words, would a single direct link from the internal page to home carry more link juice than the sum of all three canonical links?

C) Finally, I'm not entirely sure how the connection between anchor text and link juice works in detail. Say I want to rank well for "blue widgets". Using your technique, I set-up three links from an internal page with the following anchor text: "blue widgets", "red widgets", and "green widgets". I suspect that I would be better off with a single link from the internal page with the anchor text "blue widgets". Am I right?

Actually, as I said in the article, we don't have any answers to deep questions. We just found this weird.

What we are trying to check w/ new experiments are your questions A and B.

When we talk about giving more than 1 anchor text to a page, you should consider that sometimes we do not target only 1 keyword in a page (like a homepage). Sometimes you will have a link in your logo and than, in your content, you need to link to your homepage. How can you give some value with that? This is what we found to try.

I think it works really well. The point is that when someone search for a misspelled word, Google will correct the results showing the non-misspelled results page. I think using misspelled will not help you but if you use considering plural vs. singular could be helpful.

This is certainly useful research and could make it easier to rank for some longtail keywords. Although it might look a bit spammy when you overdue it- like most other things. I was hoping to publish something similar (different approach though) hopefully soon, the overwhelming feedback to fabio encourages me even more. Thanks!

Interesting post, but I'm a little skeptical of the benefits vs. costs. Repeated instances of this linking strategy could be seen as an abuse of the canonical attribute and could eventually hurt rankings because it's meant to reduce multiple content issues, not perpetuate them. Maybe I'm getting this all wrong, but doesn't this tell Google that it needs to hone in on all 3 links that include parameters AND the same content? It forces the bots to index 3 versions of the same page, when the proper use of a canonical attribute would be to tell it to use 1.

Could you do the same thing with a 'title="keyword"' attribute and not force multiple versions get indexed? If I have the details wrong here, please disregard.

The arguments are used to create a new URL, so the canonical make sense.
If you put keywords in the URL you are not measuring the canonical tag, but you are giving another way to Google identify what that page is about. Got the idea?

If the page I'm linking from has PR5 and I have only one link (anchor1) I get all the juice for that anchor1 (maximum possible pr). When you create more than one link and "cheat" the search engines you divide the juice among multiple anchors. Your maximum possible pr is the same (pr5). No improvement. I would argue you made your backlinks worse as you lost the juice for the anchors.

Really great post. You've shown how a simple experiment can be run on a small site without the need for a lot of number crunching or 1000s of test pages. Classic SEO at its finest!

The important takeaway from this is not that you can manipulate anchor text distribution, but that the canonical tag passes on whatever anchor text is pointed at it. Yet another smart way to take advantage of the canonical tag.

I like this experiments, they are so useful in predicting the search engine trends. My question is: Why did you guys take a long time like 2 weeks to wait for the results. It should be quicker that that right or did you have any other reason for that?

Thanks, dvansant, for confirming. Yeah, I just used the Google URL builder just for speed sake. Just making sure I understood what was going on. That's why I love SEOmoz: the info makes me think (hard, sometimes) lol!

This is hot! I see some major link architecture restructuring happening for our webmaster this weekend!

I'm a little confused by this. Are you only making additional pages in order to canonically direct a crawler to the homepage? Why not just make 301 redirects, since canoncial tags work in a similar way? For example, you could make domain.com/keyword1 redirect to the index page and build anchor text links for keyword1 pointing to the /keyword1 page. Wouldn't that be a more elegant way of doing the same thing?

I could be wrong here, but if I remember correctly Google would index your "3 pages" even without the canonical tag. As long as your link is using a different url they will be valid links on the same page. In other words your query parameters make the backlinks different and therefor your can tag was completely useless.

In this experiment, we only expected that Google will index the canonical, not the "3 pages". Perhaps in your example Google already used http://www.domain.com/ as the canonical, even if no canonical link element was used. If this is what you meant, then Yes, sometimes there is no need to add a canonical link element because Google picks the canonical itself.

Linking to other blogs can be a real time consuming project. There really are no shortcuts to this process but with hard work and effort, you can have a "Domino Effect" of comments on your blog if done correctly.